Hi Grant, I actually heard on the grape vine that it is OS X that altered its behaviour to match Outlook's, rather than the other way around, but the end result is the same: both clients break the rules. You're right, there may be a preference to set this behaviour in Outlook, although it strikes me as unlikely.
Essentially what's happening is that every paragraph of text is sent as a very long single line, which is MIME-encoded to get it through the email system, the idea being that different sizes of screens make it desirable of different clients to wrap lines at appropriate columns instead of requiring the messages themselves contain line breaks. However well-intentioned, though, this means that any email client which doesn't know about this particular "Format" may do the wrong thing--it may make a long line scrollable horizontally, clipping lines, or if it doesn't support MIME, it will show encoding characters. It also interferes big time with quoting in conversations; if an email client in a conversation tries to respond to such a message, strange (and wrong) things happen: only the first line of a paragraph is quoted, or an entire line is quoted and different programs show it differently. It's all a mess. The standards group that specified email has long provided a solution compatible with all software, which encodes paragraph by leaving trailing spaces at the ends of lines intended to be continued (a clever and elegant solution), but of course Microsoft and Apple instead chose to simply rely on the fact that people don't do much quoting, and that most software wraps the lines because it already supports dynamic resizing or HTML, both of which are typical of graphical email applications. The end result is that if you participate on any technical mailing list using Apple Mail and most likely Outlook, you will get shouted at by lots of people who are either using web archives, or Usenet news gateways, since their email clients and interfaces are usually the lowest common denominator, work with minimal resources, and are generally both the most flexible and the least contemporary. Apple and Microsoft simply want to change the behaviour by fiat, but many technical participants simply can't accommodate it. If I were you, I'd change at least one thing: go to plain text from HTML. Unless you intend to actually send formatted messages, plain text is fine, even for bullet points and other Unicode characters. Cheers, Sabahattin -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
